Dr. Erin Calipari
Dr. Erin Calipari
Assistant Professor Department of Pharmacology, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Postdoctoral Fellow Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
PhD in Neuroscience Wake Forest School of Medicine
From her first undergraduate science classes to her current position as an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Erin Calipari has charted her own path to success. As a first generation academic, she didn’t always know which steps she needed to take to pursue an academic career; instead, she merely followed her interests and intuitions and, with the help of supportive mentors along the way, has become a rising star in the field of addiction neurobiology. In the Department of Pharmacology at Vanderbilt, her lab seeks to understand the neural circuitry and molecular mechanisms underlying adaptive and maladaptive behaviors with the hope of developing improved treatments for psychiatric disorders and addictions.
Although she went to college to play basketball with plans of becoming a professional athlete, Erin soon found herself enrolled in countless science courses. While she thought she was “gaming the system” by taking science classes because they were “easy”, she ultimately realized that they only felt easy because she was genuinely excited and passionate about the content. When she took a course on neuropsychopharmacology and learned about drug and receptor actions in the brain, she was hooked. After turning in a grant proposal as a final project for the course, her professor noticed that she had a knack for scientific thinking and invited her to volunteer in his lab. She accepted his offer and ended up loving it so much that her professor encouraged her to apply to graduate school.
Erin’s particular research interests were born out of an initial fascination with hormones. She was attracted to the logic of a system in which the binding of a hormone to a receptor could have a clear, predictable downstream effect (though she now acknowledges that things aren’t always as clean and simple as she initially thought). Later in college and continuing into graduate school at Wake Forest School of Medicine under the mentorship of Dr. Sara Jones, she was drawn toward studying drugs because they act so similarly to hormones. Now in her own laboratory, things are coming full circle; she is merging her experience studying drugs with her early interest in hormones by investigating the interactions between hormones and drugs and the systems they regulate in the context of understanding sex differences in behavioral responses to drugs.
While Erin has had many mentors who have helped her get to where she is today, she credits Dr. Sara Jones’ mentorship as the most integral part of her academic career. One of the things she admires most about Sara is her discovery-driven rather than impact-driven approach to research. Sara encouraged her and her whole lab to ask good questions above all else. Erin describes a seemingly idyllic lab culture in which everyone would argue about a scientific question over lunch and then venture off in the afternoon to do the experiments to prove themselves right (or wrong). The experiments weren’t explicitly constructed to produce the flashiest paper or to appease a reviewer but purely to find the answer to a question. This instilled in Erin a fundamentally question-driven approach to science that has guided her throughout the rest of her career.
Erin understands the value of good mentors, especially for someone like her who did not come from an academic family. Her undergraduate experience of volunteering in a lab, and her professor's encouragement to pursue a graduate degree, led her to the realization that academic research was a viable career option. “I was passionate about what I was doing, and somebody else noticed and said ‘hey, let me give you an opportunity’,” Erin recalls. “And the thing is, those opportunities are how people get there when you’re first-generation because there’s no plan.” Now that she is in a position of power as a PI, she goes to great lengths to be a strong mentor and advocate for the people in her own laboratory and does everything she can to provide those same opportunities to other young trainees. In this way, she thinks that her atypical background gives her a more active mentoring style that accommodates individuals from a variety of different backgrounds and groups that are often underrepresented in science. “I’ve seen this so often...we have a system, and we’ve identified there’s a problem: there aren’t enough women represented; there aren’t enough URMs. And then what we say is, ‘we need to change that’, but we don’t want to change our system. We just want them to come into the system and be just like everyone else in the system,” Erin observes. Consequently, she sees it as her job to strongly advocate for these individuals who are just as smart as others in the “system” but simply aren’t accustomed to its typical rules and parameters. And this is largely motivated by her own identity as someone coming from outside of the “system” who has still found success.
Overall, Erin has found that her unique background as an atypical scientist comes with many advantages for the quality of her science and for the people she mentors. While she still feels somewhat uncomfortable being told by young women in science that they find her “inspiring”, she thinks that a lot of these women are excited to see someone who speaks and dresses and behaves differently from others in the “system” but who reminds them more of themselves. And for the people in her own lab, she makes a conscious effort to be transparent about what it’s actually like to be a PI: a normal human full of imperfections. She hopes that by being open about her mistakes and uncertainties, her mentees will feel more comfortable to ask questions when they feel uncertain and realize that there isn’t a single path to success in academia. “Some days I’m like, ‘how did I get here?!’” Erin laughs. But despite not following a single, clear path, she is now fulfilling her dream of doing exciting, question-driven science in her own laboratory and mentoring the next generation of exceptional, atypical scientists.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Erin on December 10th, 2018 here:
